Trump is dismissive of refugees, but then actively supports these South African refugees. Why? One obvious difference is that these refugees are white. Or maybe this is just Musk’s influence who has a personal interest in South Africans because he is from there? Maybe it’s because of the relative wealth and/or skills of these refugees? Is it about ease of assimilation? Does focusing on South Africa stoke fears about potentially anti-white policies in the U.S., increasing fervor and support for Trump and those like him?
The South African government is not taking land from white farmers. They have an offer to buy their land for redistributive purposes, but there is no forced land takings by the government. There is a law that could be read as allowing the government to take land from whites, but it has not been used like this so far, and it could just be similar to eminent domain laws in the United States.
There have been robberies and murders of white land owners, but there is a lot of crime in South Africa, and this is a small minority of it. It’s not clear that there is a focused crime attack on white farmers. What is clear, is that South Africa has a lot of crime in general.
“There is a real issue with South African farmers being killed or violently attacked, experts told us. But most of the violent acts are committed during robberies in a country where most of the wealth and land post-apartheid is still owned by a relatively small white minority.
“Yes, white farmers are being killed in South Africa,” political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean Jaurès Foundation in Paris, told us via email. “However, there is nothing like a ‘white genocide.’ And the issue needs to be seen in the broader context of a country plagued by crime and gang activity.”
Although police statistics are imprecise on the issue, there have been about 50 farm murders per year over the last several years. That’s less than 1% of all murders in the country.
“Murder victimization is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race,” Lizette Lancaster of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told us via email.
“Farm attacks, including murders, do occur in South Africa, and many are undeniably brutal,” Anthony Kaziboni, a political and critical sociologist at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa, told us via email. “However, South Africa must be understood in its broader socio-economic and historical context.” South Africa has “extreme inequality, with approximately 10% of the population (largely white) owning over 80% of the wealth. It also has a deeply violent past, and the country’s structural violence persists today alongside physical violence, economic violence, and many other forms of violence.”
“Violent crime affects all sectors of society, not just farmers,” Kaziboni said.”
“If the Trump administration merely ended all formal DEI training and initiatives, I wouldn’t be too concerned. They were, after all, never a significant part of what we did. What troubles me most is the attempt to stop all conversations about race and gender. Personal relationships and teams are strengthened by having difficult conversations, conversations that can sometimes make people uncomfortable. Avoiding, or worse banning, those conversations weakens both relationships and teams. Trust, mutual respect and shared values and goals are the foundations of strong teams. All are enhanced by open and candid conversations.
Eliminating any discussion of race or gender will have three negative consequences. The Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth are sending a strong message that white males are in charge again and they don’t want to hear anything about gender or racial inequities. Intended or not, that is what is being heard. Conversations I have had with leaders at all levels of the military indicate this is already having a significant impact on the morale and well-being of a large fraction of the force. Second, this is going to have a very negative effect on recruiting and retention that will deny our military the benefit of some of the most capable people in the nation. By the end of the Biden administration, we had met or exceeded all of the Department of the Air Force’s recruiting goals; I would hate to see that trend reversed. People already serving will choose to leave, and those considering service in the military will find other career options. Finally, the changes being implemented will empower the small minority of people who do have conscious gender or racial bias to act on those views. There aren’t many of these people in our military, but I can say from personal experience that they do exist.
If the Department of Defense and the nation are to move forward on gender and racial issues, we have to do it together. This means that white males like myself must join conversations that we may find uncomfortable and we must develop and display empathy for people unlike ourselves. That is called leadership. Conversations about race and gender are still going to happen no matter what policies are put in place to outlaw DEI training, ban certain words or eliminate affinity groups. Because of what the Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth are doing those conversations just won’t include white males. That is not going to make our military more united or stronger. It is going to make us weaker.”
We should focus on helping those in poverty and those with a lack of wealth and opportunity, not people who have these problems specifically because of race. Those in trouble because of legacy racial issues will be helped by race-neutral welfare.
People around most leaders say the leader is good and they have respect for them. Even people close to Trump often later say he is nuts.
“Trump’s share of the Black and Latino vote increased by 8 points each between 2020 and 2024.
Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there’s probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump’s growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration.
There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans’ attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden’s term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes.”
“Zheng Wei is a fairly common Chinese name. A tennis player, a movie director, an archaeologist, and multiple Chinese-American academics all share that name. So do an inventor at the consumer drone company DJI and a professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology.
And the U.S. government mixed up the last two people, with serious consequences, according to a recent lawsuit by DJI. The drone manufacturer is suing the U.S. Department of Defense for designating DJI as an arm of the Chinese military”
…
“Similarly, the Pentagon claimed that DJI software engineer Zhang Tao was listed on a patent for a temperature-sensing device designed by China’s Military Science Academy. Again, DJI provided a declaration from its own Zhang Tao stating that he is not the same person as the Military Science Academy’s Zhang Tao.”
“According to exit polls, 55 percent of men voted for Trump in 2024, compared to 45 percent of women, for a 10-point gender gap — 1 point less than the 11-point gap in support for Trump in both 2020 and 2016.*
Compared to other exit polling results that point to how Trump’s victory may have boiled down to a referendum on President Joe Biden and the economy, this relatively static gender gap may not point to gender as a major factor in the election. But differences in the gender gap across groups of voters — such as growing gaps among Black and Latino voters — can tell us more about the country’s changing partisan landscape. And there’s a reason gender has also been widely discussed in the aftermath of Election Day: The role that gender played in each party’s 2024 presidential campaigns highlights a potential shift in the parties’ approaches to male and female voters, and how voters think about gender and politics.”
…
“Trump’s 11-point gap in support between men and women in 2016 and 2020 was a record, but men have been consistently more likely than women to back Republicans since 1980. From then until 2016, the gender gap in support for Republicans ranged from 0 points (in 1992) to 10 points (in 2000), according to exit polls. (The phenomenon of men consistently showing stronger support for the more ideologically conservative party than women is not limited to the U.S., either.)”
…
“the gender gap isn’t uniform across all groups. For example, white men and women voted more similarly to each other in 2024 than Black or Latino men and women.”
…
“Nonwhite and younger voters had the largest gender gaps”
…
“in 2020 Trump won 61 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women, for a 6-point gender gap among white voters. That gap was just 1 point bigger this year according to exit polls — 60 percent to 53 percent, for a 7-point gender gap among white voters. But the gender gap among nonwhite voters increased by significantly more.
Among Black voters, even as the vast majority of both men and women voted Democratic in both elections, Trump gained 2 points of support among men and lost 2 among women, moving the gender gap from 10 points in 2020 to 14 points in 2024. The gap is even more striking among Latino voters, one of the groups among whom Trump gained the most support overall compared to 2020. Four years ago, 36 percent of Latino men and 30 percent of Latino women supported Trump, a gender gap of just 6 points. That gap nearly tripled in 2024, as Trump’s support among Latino men went up by almost 20 percentage points: He won 55 percent of Latino men and 38 percent of Latino women, for a gender gap of 17 points.”
…
“49 percent of men and 37 percent of women aged 18 to 29 supported Trump, for a 12-point gender gap, 3 points larger than in 2020. The gap among men and women aged 30 to 39 was also 12 points, while it actually shrank among voters over 50.”
“1) Trump has successfully associated himself with a message of economic nostalgia, heightening nonwhite Americans’ memories of the pre-Covid economy in contrast to the period of inflation we’re now exiting.
2) Trump and his campaign have also zeroed in specifically on outreach and messaging to nonwhite men as part of their larger focus on appealing to male voters.
3) Trump and his party have taken advantage of a confluence of social factors, including messaging on immigration and cultural issues, to shore up support from conservative voters of color who have traditionally voted for Democrats or not voted at all.”
…
“These three theories try to describe how Trump specifically has been able to improve his and the GOP’s standing among a growing segment of the American electorate. They place Trump as the central cause for the majority of this racial political shift. But would these dynamics still be happening if he weren’t involved?
There are signs that some of this shift may be happening independently of Trump. It could be a product of the growing diversification of America, upward mobility and changing understandings of class, and growing educational divides.
For example, as rates of immigration change and the share of US-born Latino and Asian Americans grows, their partisan loyalties may continue to change. Those born closer to the immigrant experience may have had more of a willingness to back the party seen as more welcoming of immigrants, but as generations get further away from that experience, racial and ethnic identity may become less of a factor in the development of political thinking.
Concepts of racial identity and memory are also changing — younger Black Americans, for example, have less of a tie to the Civil Rights era — potentially contributing to less strong political polarization among Black and Latino people in the US independently of any given candidate — and creating more persuadable voters in future elections.
At the same time, younger generations are increasingly identifying as independents or outside of the two-party paradigm — a change in loyalty that stands to hurt Democrats first, since Democrats tend to do better with younger voters.
Regardless of whether Trump just happens to be the right kind of populist at the right time of racial and ethnic change in America or if he’s a unique accelerator and contributor to the changes America is experiencing, November may offer more evidence that something has fundamentally changed in US politics. As America diversifies, it makes sense for its political parties to diversify too — and that poses a reckoning for Democrats in elections to come.”
“Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that racial segregation in the country’s 100 biggest school districts, which serve the most students of color, has increased by 64 percent since 1988. Economic segregation, or the division between students who receive free or reduced lunch and those who do not, increased by 50 percent since 1991.
The study primarily focused on white-Black segregation, the groups that the Brown decision addressed, but found that white-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation both also more than doubled since the late 1980s in the large school districts.”
…
““When we switched from a commitment to integration and equity to school choice, it’s not terribly surprising that we see rising school segregation,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology and public policy at USC and one of the report’s authors. “We’ve abdicated our responsibility to integration, and unfettered choice does not magically lead to integration.”
And now, the steady increase means that Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be concentrated in higher-poverty schools with fewer resources, a trend that worsens academic and life outcomes.”
…
“The study supports the idea that parents, particularly white parents, have enrolled their children in charter schools that are majority white. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, white parents have opted out of big urban district schools. There’s generally more segregation both within the charter sector and between charter and traditional public schools.”
…
“The new research shows that within five to eight years of districts being released from mandates, segregation increased. Since 1991, about two-thirds of school districts that were required to meet court desegregation mandates were removed from court oversight.”